Tokens don't need Chinese names, but the business behind them does.

Author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, you may have noticed something: everyone is starting to discuss what to call the Token.

Professor Yang Bin from Tsinghua University published an article titled “Deciding the Chinese Translation of Token Is Urgent”; related translation questions on Zhihu have garnered 250,000 views, and the comment section is full of ideas.

In the past two or three years, the domestic AI community has been using the word Token directly without issue. Why is there suddenly a need for a Chinese name?

The direct reason is that after this year’s Spring Festival, ordinary people learned for the first time that Token costs money.

OpenClaw has turned AI from chatting into work, with a single task burning through hundreds of thousands of Tokens, and bills skyrocketing; cloud service providers are also announcing price hikes, with Tokens as the billing unit.

At the same time, Token has started appearing in places where it previously shouldn’t.

At the GTC conference, NVIDIA President Jensen Huang said that in Silicon Valley, someone once asked during an interview, “How many Tokens can I get in this job?” He suggested including Tokens in engineers’ compensation;

OpenAI founder Sam Altman went even further, believing that Tokens will replace universal basic income, and that everyone will receive not money, but computing power.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that China’s daily Token consumption went from 100 billion at the start of 2024 to over 40 trillion by September 2025, reaching 180 trillion in February this year. The People’s Daily published an article early this year titled “A Casual Talk on Morphemes,” explaining what this term means.

As a technical term, once it enters cloud service bills, recruitment compensation packages, and official statistics, it can no longer be called by its English name.

The question is, what should it be called?

If this were just a translation issue, there would already be an answer. In 2021, the domestic academic community assigned a name to Token: “Morpheme.”

But no one paid attention because, at that time, Token was still just an internal term within the tech circle.

Now, it’s different.

The word Token itself is a universal container. Previously, people in the crypto world called it a “token,” security experts called it a “token,” and AI researchers called it a “morpheme.” The direction of the Chinese translation depends on which domain it belongs to.

Thus, a naming contest for Token has begun.

Business needs discourse power

How to translate a word is usually a linguist’s job. But this time, almost no linguists are involved in the naming process.

The most prominent name right now is “ZhiYuan” (智元).

The most active supporter is a media outlet called “New ZhiYuan” (新智元). If the Chinese name for Token is set as “ZhiYuan,” this company’s brand name overlaps with the industry’s fundamental terminology, effectively giving every article discussing Token free advertising for it.

Their promotional article ends honestly: “We suggest translating Token as ‘ZhiYuan,’ a new industry consensus: leave the ‘new’ to us.”

According to the same article, Wang Xiaochuan, founder of Baichuan Intelligence, commented: “Calling it ZhiYuan (智元) is quite good.”

He works on large models, so calling Token ZhiYuan makes sense. Instead of a billing unit, each computation output becomes a “basic unit of intelligence.”

Selling Tokens is selling traffic; selling ZhiYuan is selling intelligence. The valuation stories are entirely different.

Professor Yang Bin from Tsinghua University proposed “MoYuan” (模元), where “Mo” (模) corresponds to models. Whoever owns the large model controls the production of “MoYuan.” Moving the name toward the model direction shifts pricing power to the model companies.

Some also advocate for “FuYuan” (符元), returning to the most fundamental computer science definition: a Token is a symbol processing unit, unrelated to intelligence or models.

Technically, this is the cleanest, but the proposer is an independent tech author without company backing or capital support. In this discussion, it has almost no influence.

The direction of the name influences the industry narrative, and money flows accordingly.

A distant example: when Facebook rebranded as Meta, “metaverse” transformed from a sci-fi concept into a company’s valuation story; a more recent example is China consuming 180 trillion Tokens daily, the world’s largest. But what this word is called, how to define it, and who defines it—these questions remain unresolved…

The world’s largest Token-consuming country hasn’t even decided what to call what it consumes.

But, in fact, this term already has a Chinese name.

In 2021, Professor Qiu Xipeng from Fudan University translated Token as “Ciyuan” (词元), which was accepted by academia and included in textbooks. At that time, no one discussed this because Token was still worthless.

Now, Token is valuable.

It is the billing unit for cloud services, the revenue source for large model companies, and a core indicator for national AI industry statistics. So, media, industry leaders, and professors have come forward, each with their preferred name and reasoning.

Translation has never been the problem. The real question is: when did this word start to be valuable?

Jensen Huang didn’t participate in the Chinese naming discussion at GTC. He did something simpler: he raised a champion belt with “Token King” printed on it, declaring data centers as Token factories.

Who produces Tokens, who defines Tokens. He doesn’t care what the name is.

Token, land grabbing, and coin minting

Therefore, the truly important aspect of this matter isn’t which translation is better.

After “calorie” was established, the entire food industry’s pricing, labeling, and regulatory systems were built around it. After “traffic” was defined in China’s telecom industry, operators billed, competed, and designed packages based on traffic, and the entire business model revolved around these two words for over a decade.

Token is now following the same path.

It has become the billing unit for cloud services, the revenue metric for large model companies, and a core indicator for measuring AI industry scale at the national level. Venture capitalists are even discussing whether investment funds can be directly paid in Tokens.

Once a word becomes a measure of money, naming it isn’t just translation—it’s minting currency.

Calling it “ZhiYuan” grants the minting rights to AI narratives; whoever promotes the story of intelligence benefits. Calling it “MoYuan” grants the minting rights to model companies; whoever owns large models can print money. Calling it “FuYuan” returns the minting rights to the technology itself, but technology can’t speak for itself.

The “Ciyuan” (词元) term from academia in 2021 was ignored not because of poor translation, but because that “coin” wasn’t worth anything back then.

Now, it’s valuable, and everyone wants to carve their own name on it.